Information systems that discover and explore associations between entities described by underlying data abound into today's information based economies. Examples of these information systems include data warehouses, business intelligence systems, search engines, and the like. Many of these systems utilize commercial data base management systems, such as ORACLE 12c available from Oracle Corporation of Redwood City, Calif. Other systems, such as the GOOGLE search engine available from Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. utilize proprietary data base systems, such as BigTable and Spanner.
However, conventional information systems, including conventional database systems, have fallen behind today's enhanced hardware and software capabilities. Stated differently, conventional information systems are not designed to leverage the enhanced processing power and expanded addressable memory space presently available or, further still, the enhanced processing power and expanded addressable memory space on the horizon.
For example, various CPUs now exist that are capable of implementing the 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set (also known as x64). As will be appreciated by those having ordinary skill in the art, these x64 computing systems include vastly larger sets of addressable memory as compared to conventional computing systems. Moreover, it is anticipated that 512-bit extensions to the 256-bit Advanced Vector Extensions SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instructions for x86 instruction set architecture will be available in the coming year(s). One example of such 512-bit extensions that is eagerly anticipated is the AVX-512 extensions proposed by Intel in July 2013. However, conventional information systems are ill equipped to leverage the parallel processing capabilities that will be available with, for example, the AVX-512 extensions and processors configured to execute the same. In addition, it is anticipated that GPGPUs (General Purpose Graphics Processing Units) will represent attractive hardware options for performing highly efficient processing moving forward because of their architecture, which lends itself to massive parallel processing. Yet, conventional information systems are not designed in a way to leverage the computing power that is currently available, or will be available shortly.
Accordingly, what are needed are computing systems and methods of modeling object networks that account for the dramatic improvements in computer hardware and software presently available and on the near horizon.